iPhone in a glider?

"Martin Gregorie" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:25:42 -0500, Michael Ash wrote:


Anyone know more about it? I'd like to know more than my patchwork
memory....

In the UK, anyway, the base station transmission patterns are quite flat
which can stop you getting a signal in the air.

A year or two back I wanted to annoy a friend with the "ring him and hold
phone by the audio vario" trick, but at 3000ft over Huntingdon, i.e.
above a flat bit of Cambridgeshire, there was no signal at all. I was
using a GSM phone, so the radiation pattern was evidently flat enough the
exclude not only Huntingdon masts but also those further away (Cambridge,
Northampton). This makes sense to me. Why should a telco waste
electricity transmitting a hemispherical pattern when a pancake pattern
will give a better signal strength for less radiated power throughout its
service area.

IIRC this has been noticed and commented on in the USA too.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

My experience with Verizon in the US is that it usually works fine from a
glider.

I used it once to call a tower after my radio failed - but they didn't
answer. They later told me that they couldn't take time to answer the
ringing phone, "because there was some guy in a glider with an inoperative
radio" they had to deal with. Instead they just shot me a green light and I
landed.

On Sep 19, 8:25*am, Michael Ash wrote:
Alan wrote:
I just took my new 3G for a flight. gpstracker application works very
well to track flights on google earth. Also gives Long/Lat speed as
well as altitude every 5 seconds. Check it out.

*It might be fun, but it is also quite illegal.

*47 cfr 22.925 states:

* * 22.925 * Prohibition on airborne operation of cellular telephones.

[snip]

Aside from the use of "airplane mode", I seem to recall a discussion about
this a while ago wherein it was concluded that modern mobile phones don't
meet the FCC's definition of a "cell phone". The reasoning behind this
regulation is that using a cell phone in flight plays merry havoc with the
cell network due to seeing towers farther away than the network is
designed for. But modern networks work differently and are immune to this
problem, and I *think* the conclusion was that the regulation does not
apply to them.

Anyone know more about it? I'd like to know more than my patchwork
memory....

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon


As pilot in command of a non-IFR flight I grant myself permission to
use all kinds of electronic toys in flight. So that gets rid of FAA
concerns. However my belief is that 47 CFR. 22.925 does apply to the
iPhone since it is quad-band GSM that uses the GSM 850MHz band in the
USA. If you have say a different brand PCS phone that exclusively uses
1800MHz then this would not apply to you.

There is a wiki entry about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft

In reality I turn my phone off to save battery life and distractions
like the phone ringing while I'm on final (it's happened).

So would I really want some new soaring software running on an iPhone?
Sure I could see lots of neat UI things that could be done (Cocoa is a
lovely UI to develop for) and the platform is powerful etc. The screen
is a bit more visible in sunlight than most PDA screens, but it is
still not really great. The downside of that is I'm set in my ways
with SeeYou, so if Naviter wanted to port across SeeYou keeping some
of it's core behavior/feature but offering an updated Cocoa UI/feel
then I might be interested. Except for a few issues...

I'm not going to use anything that does not talk to an external flight
computer, e.g. for extended NEMA sentences for improved wind
calculations etc. and I want to be sure my IGC logger is working OK so
getting the GPS from it is a way to test this. Also I really don't
want to mess with my iPhone as the display device in my glider, it's
my phone that gets messed with a lot. But I'd be happy to dedicate an
iPod Touch to this - in which case since it has no GPS you really need
an external interface. Unfortunately the iPhone SDK does not give
access to the serial port, and even if you had access to the serial
port you will need some RS-232 line driver hardware to shift voltages
to interface with a real RS-232 serial port in the GPS. The fact that
Apple did not include that in the iPhone makes me think they really
don't want to expose the serial port. The iPhone has bluetooth but
does not support a serial profile, so you can't connect to a
bluetooth GPS, or try to run a serial-bluetooth convertor on a flight
computer serial port etc. over bluetooth. And it's just a USB slave
(like a PDA) so you can't use a USB to serial translator. Then there
is the issue of no way to use a CF or SD card or USB dongle etc. for
flight log transfers and there is no third party code to run on it to
download flight traces from loggers etc. Sure something like ConnectMe
could be ported over (oops if there was just access to that danged
serial port), oh and opps there is no file management UI in the iPhone
so doing things nice and easily with log files etc. will be clumsier
than it should). You could use or implement something like FileMagnet
or DataCase and transfer log files over WiFi (of course that requires
a WiFi setup), or email the file, otherwise you are going to stuck
emailing file attachments or having to sync the iPhone to get off any
log files.

As it currently stands Apple's iPhone SDK license agreement has the
restrictions mentioned already in this thread "Applications may not be
designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or
autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or ..." (it is the real time
route guidance that likely gets us, the "aircraft" stuff is irrelevant
since we are not talking about an automatic or autonomous control".
This restriction is in the SDK agreement, not just the iTunes store,
so the only way around this is to use a non-Apple SDK with a jail
broken phone. Then you are (questionably) violating other agreements.
For anybody to put serious effort into developing such software, even
if they wanted to open source it or give away binaries I doubt there
is a significant enough "market" in jail broken 3G iPhones and their
owners who want to put up with this. And while distributing through
the AppStore is neat, it has some serious pain in the ass issues for
higher end applications, starting with customer support say worthy of
0.99c applications. If somebody was serious and could get around the
serial I/O and other issues then they could try talking to Apple, they
might agree to modify route guidance restriction for a specific
application (but don't hold your breath).


Darryl

In reality I turn my phone off to save battery life and distractions
like the phone ringing while I'm on final (it's happened).


I do now. I was on short final when my wife decided to call me. My
student did a double take and said "what the f...?". The name of my ring
tone is "vario rising".

Tony V.

On Sep 18, 1:32*am, "Matt Herron Jr." wrote:
Come up with some good ideas, and maybe I will implement one!

How about porting GlidePlan? Or a nice user friendly sectional chart
viewer?

Unless someone comes up with moving map software that can display
CURRENT sectional chart information, I'll still need to carry paper
charts.

What I do now, is use GlidePlan to print up a 60% 'booklet' of the
charts I plan to fly with. I forget the actual percent shrinkage, but
it's just small enough so one side of the chart fits on a portrait
sized 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I then use 20% page overlap, so I'm
always looking near the middle of a page. The text is pretty small,
but still just barely legible so I can pick up any needed frequencies,
etc.

The viewer program should provide pan and zoom functionality as well
as an automated switch to the next chart as one scrolls off the edge.
It should use the GPS to select the right chart, as well as have a
database of airports & cities, so I could enter such and the proper
chart will be displayed and centered on that location.

-Tom
Who has ATT service with a 5 month old Samsung BlackJack that's way
too dim to use for color apps in sunlight.

On Sep 20, 3:34*am, Michael Ash wrote:
Bruce Hoult wrote:
The main problem is the risk. It *shouldn't* apply to an aviation
application, but the only way to really find out is to actually build the
app, submit it, and see if they let it through. If they don't, that's a
lot of work potentially lost.

Not lost. If you make your plans based on surviving using
distribution independent of Apple then you can submit to the AppStore
and see what happens. If you get in then bonus.

The PodCaster guys are reportedly doing brisk business despite not
being in the AppStore.

On Sep 19, 5:53*pm, Bruce Hoult wrote:
On Sep 20, 3:34*am, Michael Ash wrote:

Bruce Hoult wrote:
The main problem is the risk. It *shouldn't* apply to an aviation
application, but the only way to really find out is to actually build the
app, submit it, and see if they let it through. If they don't, that's a
lot of work potentially lost.

Not lost. *If you make your plans based on surviving using
distribution independent of Apple then you can submit to the AppStore
and see what happens. *If you get in then bonus.

The PodCaster guys are reportedly doing brisk business despite not
being in the AppStore.

The Podcaster guys sell a ~$10 application that Apple can apparently
turn off at any time. The logic why they don't just submit through the
iTunes store is questionable. This is not just an issue if you want to
distribute through the store, it's a base restriction in the SDK.
Anybody wanting to put real effort into doing this is going to want to
sort this out before building the application. Then it's a closed
system and you are always pretty much at Apple's mercy. Which I assume
Bruce is used to thinking about - since if his product is doing Java
compilation then unless you've got a deal with Apple that software is
going to run up against the "other executable code"/interpreted
languages restriction in the SDK agreement...

....Just to hammer this to death I disagree that the comment that the
ecosystem of distributing apps for the iPhone is like other mobile
device. The iPhone is designed to be a closed system. But hey it's a
very pretty closed system. The App store infrastructure is nice for
low margin micro-applications (and why others like Microsoft are
running to catch up) but has more issues for serious applications.
Like the software vendors inability to very rapidly patch things,
Apple being able to make fairly arbitrary decisions, etc. etc.

But again, I'd claim there are practical restrictions today that
probably are showstoppers for a serious application... no I/O over
serial port, bluetooth or USB, no CF/SD card, no file system/file
UI, ... Of all these I'd hope that Apple would add a serial profile to
bluetooth and a (limited) filesystem like UI in future.


Darryl

Bruce Hoult wrote:
On Sep 20, 3:34?am, Michael Ash wrote:
Bruce Hoult wrote:
The main problem is the risk. It *shouldn't* apply to an aviation
application, but the only way to really find out is to actually build the
app, submit it, and see if they let it through. If they don't, that's a
lot of work potentially lost.

Not lost. If you make your plans based on surviving using
distribution independent of Apple then you can submit to the AppStore
and see what happens. If you get in then bonus.

Well, that's why I said "potentially", since the end result depends on
your planning and your market. For a small, cheap app you really lose out,
but a more specialized expensive app is in a better position to use
alternative venues.

The PodCaster guys are reportedly doing brisk business despite not
being in the AppStore.

Not sure how it compares to being in the official store, though,
particularly in the long run. And it's a *lot* more work for them the way
they're currently doing it. Every customer has to be manually added
through Apple's rather cumbersome tools (because they're not meant for
this) and this may have to be re-done for every update they release, I'm
not sure on that point. However this is considerably less of an issue for
specialist soaring software.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

Darryl Ramm wrote:
The Podcaster guys sell a ~$10 application that Apple can apparently
turn off at any time. The logic why they don't just submit through the
iTunes store is questionable.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but they did submit through the store
and were rejected, and for rather questionable reasons.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

On Sep 19, 8:16*pm, Michael Ash wrote:
Darryl Ramm wrote:
The Podcaster guys sell a ~$10 application that Apple can apparently
turn off at any time. The logic why they don't just submit through the
iTunes store is questionable.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but they did submit through the store
and were rejected, and for rather questionable reasons.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

Oops, sorry your completely correct, I had a brain fade. Yes Apple
trying to protect the iTunes WiFi store podcast downloads they don't
support!

Darryl

Darryl

In article Darryl Ramm writes:

As pilot in command of a non-IFR flight I grant myself permission to
use all kinds of electronic toys in flight. So that gets rid of FAA
concerns.

Sounds good. It has long worked for me, too.

However my belief is that 47 CFR. 22.925 does apply to the
iPhone since it is quad-band GSM that uses the GSM 850MHz band in the
USA. If you have say a different brand PCS phone that exclusively uses
1800MHz then this would not apply to you.

Perhaps not, because some call those PCS instead of cellphones, but I don't
know what the FCC's reaction would be. I would not want to be explaining it
when they are pointing out some definition in another part of the rules that
says cell phone covers both...


I'm not going to use anything that does not talk to an external flight
computer, e.g. for extended NEMA sentences for improved wind
calculations etc. and I want to be sure my IGC logger is working OK so
getting the GPS from it is a way to test this. Also I really don't
want to mess with my iPhone as the display device in my glider, it's
my phone that gets messed with a lot.

How true. A well integrated system could reduce pilot workload and increase
safety. The iPhone is cute, and a system one could use on the ground to play
with would be fun, but it really doesn't fit well into a fully integrated flight
and nav computer.

Alan